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The H Roundup - Firefox 16, security holes and Secure Boot plans

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item.

Top News

Mozilla released version 16 of its Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client this week, adding a number of new features to both applications and closing numerous security holes. However, due to a privacy vulnerability discovered after the release, the organisation pulled Firefox 16 to address the issue along with other critical security problems. The developers later released further updates to the standard and ESR versions of Firefox and Thunderbird to correct flaws.

A botnet was used to map the entire IPv4 address space and the popular massively multi-player online role-playing game World of Warcraft was hit by a mass extinction hack. Adobe patched 25 critical holes in Flash and version 3.0 of HTTPS Everywhere browser extension arrived with support for 1,500 more sites.

The latest installation images of Arch Linux saw the distribution's default boot process switch to systemd for the live system, and Canonical started asking for donations when users download Ubuntu. Samsung contributed the F2FS filesystem for inclusion in the Linux kernel, and the Linux Foundation presented its Secure Boot solution.

Featured Articles

This week, Andrew Back took a look at a GSM Base Transceiver Station running open source software that can provide a standalone mobile telephone network, and Glyn Moody examined the effect Moore's Law has had on bringing technology to the wider public and its impact on open source.

Open Source Releases

Version 4.0 of Apache Lucene and Solr arrived, the new 5.7.0 release of ApacheMQ added support for Java 7, and the latest development version of Mesa implemented support for OpenGL 3.1. The Obnam snapshotting backup utility introduced diff commands for backups, and Ubuntu Tweak regained its former Apps functionality. The ownCloud cloud storage and synchronisation software can now mount external cloud storage.